Immanuel Kant Freedom Motive and Duty Kant

Immanuel Kant

Freedom Motive and Duty

Kant believed possessing and maintaining one's moral goodness is the very condition under which anything else is worth having or pursuing. Intelligence and even pleasure are worth having only on the condition that they do not require giving up one's fundamental moral convictions. The value of a good will thus cannot be that it gains certain valuable ends, whether of our own or of others, since their value is entirely conditional on our possessing and maintaining a good will. Its goodness must not depend on obtaining any particular ends. A good will must then also be good in itself and not in virtue of its relationship to other things such as an individual's own happiness or overall welfare.

A good will is a will whose decisions are wholly determined by moral demands or Moral Law. Human beings view this Law as a constraint on their desires, and hence a will in which the Moral Law is decisive is motivated by the thought of duty. It is the presence of desires that could operate independently of moral demands that makes goodness in human beings an essential element of the idea of duty. Unqualified goodness means we act in certain ways that we might not want to, or the thought that we have moral duties.

Categorical Imperatives

A Categorical Imperative is an absolute and universal moral obligation. Kant believed categorical imperative help us to know which actions are obligatory and which are forbidden. Hypothetical imperatives, according to Kant, are conditional: 'If I want x then I must do y'. These are not moral imperatives. Kant thought the only moral imperatives were categorical: 'I ought to do x," with no suggestion of desires or needs.

Kant formulated three Categorical Imperatives: 1) Universal law -- All moral statements should be general laws, which apply to everyone under any circumstances - there should be no occasion under which an exception is made. 2) Treat humans as ends in themselves - you should never treat people as a means to some end. People should always be treated as ends in themselves. 3) Act as if you live in a kingdom of ends - all rational people are able to deduce whether an argument was moral or not through reason alone, thus all rational humans should be able to conclude the same moral laws.

Taxing the Rich

By these criteria taxing the rich would only be acceptable if one could maintain ones moral goodness. In other words, if motivated out of a sense of moral duty, than it is acceptable behavior. Conversely, if the rich pay taxes out of a sense of moral duty, believing that it is the right thing to do, and done for no personal ends, then that would be acceptable behavior.